Marketing green can be a challenge for even the most seasoned professional. There are many reasons for this of course: consumer beliefs are still evolving; demand is not well established; and even where it is, purchase behavior tends to be inconsistent (e.g., the same consumer buys the hybrid and the SUV).
For green marketers to be successful, they must effectively and efficiently target their audience when and where consumers are most receptive to green messaging. For marketers, this is no easy task.
While green content sites or periodicals may seem like a natural fit, advertisers must remember that consumers come in all shades of green. As such, focused periodicals may only reach “deep greens” which today represent only a fraction of the total population that express some level of interest in green. Instead, marketers must target their audience in more mainstream channels.
Today, companies like earthsense are emerging to empower marketers to do just that.
At its core, earthsense is a market research company focused on green consumers. What differentiates earthsense, however, is the depth and breadth of it dataset regarding consumer attitudes, behaviors and demographics. This dataset is based on both proprietary research as well as partner data sources. For marketers, mining this dataset has the potential to uncover rich consumer insights that can help shape messaging, as well as guide marketing and media investments in a more targeted way.
Recently, I had the opportunity to speak with Amy Hebard, Chief Research Officer and Founder of earthsense. We spoke about earthsense’s unique data set, consumer insights derived from the database and opportunities to leverage the data to more effectively target consumers, particularity via retail channels. Here is what she had to say:
MG: Earthsense fields one of the largest surveys in the green space. What makes your data unique?
AH: Targeting and finding the “green” consumer – whether we’re talking about “super greens” willing to pay a premium, mass market “greens” who want to be eco-friendly without an added charge, or “non-greens” who wouldn’t buy “green” products even if they cost less than standard prices – is an enormous challenge for many marketers today.
When we started earthsense, we knew that we needed to take a fresh look at the resources available to us to solve this problem. We decided to combine best-in-practice techniques of market research, database marketing and advanced geo-spatial analysis to provide new insights in this space.
First, our Eco-Insights survey is the largest by far in the US: we survey 60,000 US adults each year. This gives us unprecedented capabilities to slice and dice our data for almost any demographic group of interest (e.g., high income earners, newlyweds, parents, baby boomers, college students, expectant moms, etc).
Second, and even more important, is our ability to append almost any kind of data, because we have geocoded each record. While personal information remains anonymous to us, we supplement each record with additional data to complete our profiles. This includes neighborhood level demographics and “exographic” data (i.e., data about the community in which they live). This includes air quality in the community, data regarding traffic congestion, and nearness to a Wal-Mart or other major chains, for example.
In short, we believe there are a multitude of factors that shape consumers’ desires and ability to go green. And we think the answers can be found by fusing data from various sources to find patterns that are not easy to detect using the data available through the other providers.
Pages: 1 2
Loading ...